Name day finder

The finder looks a first name up in the chosen calendar and lists every saint's day of that name. One of them is marked as the usual date: in England's calendar, the celebration with the highest rank. The next date and the days left are counted from the date on your own device, so they move on at midnight. Short forms lead to the full name, so Jack opens John.

Take John, the name with the most dates in this calendar. Counted from Thursday, 29 October 2026, the next of its 22 dates is Friday, 4 December 2026, 36 days away. Its usual dates are 24 June and 27 December, and every other date appears as a button that opens the list for that day. For a running countdown to any of them, in weeks and sleeps as well as days, the days until countdown counts to a date of your choice.

Choosing a date instead lists the names of that day, the main ones first. On 29 September England's calendar gives Gabriel, Michael and Raphael, the archangels. The month view shows a whole month with the main names in bold, and Print this month prints that list alone. 29 February has a place of its own, and a saint's day on it comes round only in a leap year.

The address keeps the calendar, the view, the date and the month, so a shared link opens the same list. A typed name and a birthday go only into the part after the # sign, which browsers never send to a server, and nothing is stored. The calendars are files that load after the page opens, and another country's list loads only when it is chosen or asked for.

On the feast day of your namesake saint. In this calendar John's usual dates are 24 June and 27 December, David's is 1 March and Elizabeth's is 17 November. The same lookup for a set of familiar British names follows, each with the saint behind its first usual date.

Your saint's day belongs to the name, not to you. Everyone called Patrick shares 17 March and everyone called Andrew 30 November, whatever their birthdays. When a name has several saints, the finder marks the highest ranking celebration as usual. It still lists the others, and a family with a particular saint in mind keeps that feast day. No British tradition sets these dates: they come from the Catholic Church's calendar for England, because Britain keeps no name days of its own. For a Polish or Italian date, the calendar is switched at the top. The result then follows that country's list, with its own spellings, short forms and usual dates, so the same name can land on another day.

Irish, Scottish and Welsh forms count as well. Jack, Ian and Sean open John, Seamus and Hamish open James, and Dewi opens David. In all, the calendar knows 165 such forms for its 161 names. A form shared by two names, such as Jo or Sam, is left out, so the finder never has to guess between them.

The feast of the saint you were named after at baptism, where your family knows which one that is. Otherwise the finder marks a date by rank. Catholic ranks run from solemnity down to feast, memorial and optional memorial. The Liturgy Office of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales adds that a celebration given no other rank is an optional memorial.

John shows how this works. Its 22 dates include St John the Baptist, a solemnity on 24 June, and St John the Apostle, a feast on 27 December. Each ranks highest of its kind, so both count as usual. Mary has 19 dates, several of them solemnities, and the finder takes the Assumption on 15 August. Where two saints share the top rank, as the memorials of St Anthony the Abbot and St Anthony of Padua do, both stay usual: 17 January and 13 June.

For a name with two or more dates, Which date is yours? reads a birthday in two ways. One takes the first saint's day on or after the birthday, going round the year. The other takes the one nearest to it, a later one winning a tie. Someone called John born on 1 July gets 4 August by the first reading and 24 June by the second. Both are customs, not rules, and the result says so.

Since no one in Britain marks a usual name day, each usual date here is EasyToolbox's own reading of the ranks. John (22 dates), Mary (19 dates) and Peter (9 dates) have the most, while 131 of the 161 names have a single date.

Britain keeps no name days and publishes no calendar of them. The closest thing is the Catholic calendar of England. It combines the General Roman Calendar of the Roman Catholic Church with the National Calendar for England, and the Liturgy Office publishes both. The Cambridge Dictionary's word for each such day is saint's day, the day on which the Church honours a particular saint.

England's national calendar raises some ranks. St George's Day on 23 April is a solemnity there, and St David, St Patrick and St Andrew have feasts. The four patron saints of the nations therefore lead their days.

The St Andrew's Day Bank Holiday (Scotland) Act 2007 made St Andrew's Day a bank holiday in Scotland, and GOV.UK lists St Patrick's Day as one in Northern Ireland. GOV.UK lists no bank holiday for St George's Day or St David's Day. The finder gives the saints' days only, not the days off work.

Behind England, the switch lists Poland, Italy, Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands, in that order. That is where a Polish colleague's imieniny, an Italian friend's onomastico or a German Namenstag can be found. At Census 2021 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found Poland to be the second most common country of birth outside the UK among residents of England and Wales.

The lists differ a great deal in size: England's holds 161 names, Poland's 2,470. Each is built from an open source, with EasyToolbox's own curation of usual dates and short forms on top.

In Poland, Anna's name day is 26 July, and Kasia leads to Katarzyna, whose usual date there is 25 November. Polish lists give some names a long run of days: Maria has 64 and no single usual date. Italy marks Giovanni's usual dates as 24 June and 27 December, the same two saints as England's John.

The Wikipedia lists are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Where no authority marks a usual date, the usual dates in those calendars are EasyToolbox's reading too, and calendars from different publishers often disagree on a day. Under any result, a button looks the same spelling up in the other calendars. Where one of them knows it as a form of its own name, it shows that name.

Many first names popular in Britain today have no saint in this calendar, among them Olivia, Noah, Isla and Muhammad. The ONS figures for babies born in England and Wales in 2025 put Olivia and Muhammad at the top of the lists. Typing such a name shows names that begin with the same three letters, which are other names rather than a stand-in, and the button to look abroad.

Some of these names do appear on other countries' lists: Olivia is on those of Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. No British source gives a custom for names without a saint, so the finder suggests none.

Muhammad and other names from other faiths get no date at all. The calendar holds only saints' days of the Catholic Church, and the finder never matches such a name to a Christian saint.

The Church of England keeps a calendar of its own in Common Worship, and a few of its days differ from the Catholic ones used here. St Alban (20 June here), St Chad (26 October here) and St Cuthbert (4 September here) are remembered on other days there. An Anglican parish may therefore keep a different date.

Oxford Learner's Dictionaries describes a name day as the yearly day of the saint a person is named after. A birthday is the anniversary of the day that person was born, so the two rarely meet: every George shares 23 April, while birthdays are spread over the year.

A naming day is different again. It is a ceremony held once to welcome a child and give it a name, with no fixed date and no return each year. The finder holds no naming days, only the yearly saints' days of its calendars.

Greek, Cypriot, Romanian and other Orthodox calendars are not covered. The Orthodox Churches keep their own calendars of saints, and none of them is on the switch. A date given here may therefore not be the Greek or Romanian one for the same name.

The name day finder holds Western Church calendars only: England's from the Liturgy Office and the others from Wikipedia lists, each checked and curated by EasyToolbox. How the site checks its sources is set out on the methodology page.